Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Resolution Way

The dead she
has heard someone say, must die twice, first the physical death, then the death
must be recorded, ritualised, through periods of mourning, funerals, the
scattering of ashes, acknowledged in stages. And perhaps they must die twice in order to live again. She remembers how for a year, perhaps more, they
didn’t speak of Harvey, the father, the husband, for fear of the emotions they
would provoke in each other, repressed him, kept him locked away, ghostly,
gestating until one day the conversation at the dinner table turned fleetingly
to him and Lee remarked how now he could hear certain songs that he associated
closely with his Dad and not tear up. A few days later Paula Adonor had a dream
that Harvey was sitting in the bedroom, waiting patiently as the kids hoovered
up outside and made the place clean, as though in preparation for his return, and
that in the dream she was Harvey too, and also the kids, and herself, watching.
The room was full of light and there he was, quiet, patient, returned from his
exile in death, a figure they could discuss, invoke, enjoy again.

That sublime
dream in which she was everyone and all things, both herself and others the
observer and what she observed and even in the telling of it language got in
the way, broke things up, forced the dream to take on difference and
contradiction, separation, when in that beautiful suspended moment, in that
light of a life brought back from death there was no time or separation, no
words, only the holistic, perfect, uncompromised image and the knowledge, the
wisdom to know we are outside life or death, space and time, self and other,
except that words, words will divide us up and cage us and condemn us.

Well, what
does that mean? Except that Vernon, poor Vernon has not even died once, he
still has so far to go before he can be return. Perhaps this interest of Alex
Hargreaves’ will help to speed his passage back to the world, let him mingle
with us again, silent, contented, reborn.

And as she
drifts off she finds herself gently lulled and lifted out of time into a realm
where all borders become progressively more porous, dissolve. It all makes sense
here on the threshold of sleep, the echo-memory of the bliss of the
yet-to-be-born, a mounting babble of soothing nonsense that crowds out her
thoughts, language that liquefies into pure tones and dim modulations, a soft
flurry of half-forgotten scenes and …..